It’s hard to be an Obama sycophant these days. Your hero delivers a Ramadan speech roundly supporting the building of a mosque and Islamic center near Ground Zero in New York. Your heart swells and you’re moved to declare this President Obama’s finest hour, his act of greatest courage. Alas, the next day, at a [...]
Archive for August, 2010
Moral myopia at Ground Zero
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on August 19, 2010 | Comments Off
A Thousand Miles in the Footsteps of Martin Luther
Posted in Religion on August 19, 2010 | Comments Off
How to think about the Reformation at 500. Lutherans world-wide are already buzzing about 2017, the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, commonly regarded as the starting point of the Reformation. But no one’s quite sure about the right way to observe the occasion. Should Lutherans celebrate the profound insights of a brilliant theologian [...]
What if ‘English Only’ Isn’t Wrong?
Posted in Language on August 19, 2010 | Comments Off
Foreigners learn our language; we don’t learn theirs. On the campaign trail in 2008, Barack Obama was asked about foreign-language education. He responded emphatically, calling it “embarrassing” that most Americans are monolingual. Being able to speak a foreign language makes you “so much more employable,” he said. “We should be emphasizing foreign languages in our [...]
Information Overload Is Nothing New
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Living on August 19, 2010 | Comments Off
From the Roman Empire to the BlackBerry jam. It’s high summer and we’re all out there seeing each other. We’re not hidden away in our homes and offices as we are in winter’s cold. We’re part of a crowd—on the street, in the park, on the boardwalk, on the top deck of the ferry to [...]
Privileges of the House
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on August 18, 2010 | Comments Off
Charlie Rangel’s floor speech echoed the complaints of an earlier fallen House potentate, former Speaker Jim Wright. There can’t be a better place on Earth to deliver a mea culpa speech than the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. Not the Oval Office, not the British Parliament, not even the stage of a televangelist’s [...]
A Renegade and His Regrets
Posted in History on August 18, 2010 | Comments Off
A Confederate who refused to quit fighting but ended up a model citizen. In August 1865 the French military garrison at Matehuala, in central Mexico, fully expected to be slaughtered by the Mexican troops besieging the outpost. Napoleon III had imposed Emperor Maximilian I on the country the year before, supplanting Mexican President Benito Juarez. [...]
Blagojevich 23, Fitzgerald 1
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Law, Politics on August 18, 2010 | Comments Off
Chicago’s jester politician humiliates the Justice Department. Rod Blagojevich was charged with everything from shaking down a Chicago children’s hospital to attempting to sell or trade the U.S. Senate seat once held by President Obama, yet on Tuesday the former Illinois Governor was convicted on only the least serious of the 24 felony counts against [...]
Deconstructing Harry Reid
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on August 18, 2010 | Comments Off
The Senate majority leader’s inexplicable desire to debate taxes in September. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid can say the darndest things. He certainly did last week when he proclaimed: “I don’t know how anyone of Hispanic heritage could be a Republican.” That must have thrilled his son, Rory, who’s trailing a Hispanic Republican, Judge Brian [...]
As Darkness Falls
Posted in Literature on August 18, 2010 | Comments Off
For busy, harried or distractible readers who have the time and energy only to skim the opening paragraph of a review, I’ll say this as quickly and clearly as possible: “The Death of the Adversary” and “Comedy in a Minor Key” are masterpieces, and Hans Keilson is a genius. First published in the Netherlands in [...]
‘No Reason to Discriminate Against Gay Partnerships’
Posted in Law on August 18, 2010 | Comments Off
Germany’s top court has ruled that registered homosexual partnerships should have the same inheritance tax rights as married couples. Germany’s highest court has ruled that gay couples in civil partnerships are entitled to the same inheritance tax rights as married couples. Most of the German press welcomes the ruling, with many editorials arguing that the [...]
Blagojevich and Legal Bribery
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Law on August 18, 2010 | Comments Off
IN May 1980, during the height of the movement to add an Equal Rights Amendment for women to the Constitution, an activist named Wanda Brandstetter delivered a note to Nord Swanstrom, an Illinois state representative. “Mr. Swanstrom,” it said, “the offer to help in your election and $1,000 for your campaign for pro-E.R.A. vote.” Things [...]
How to Win the Clash of Civilizations
Posted in Editorials and opinion on August 17, 2010 | Comments Off
The key advantage of Huntington’s famous model is that it describes the world as it is—not as we wish it to be. What do the controversies around the proposed mosque near Ground Zero, the eviction of American missionaries from Morocco earlier this year, the minaret ban in Switzerland last year, and the recent burka ban [...]
The Mark Hurd Show
Posted in Economy and business, Editorials and opinion on August 17, 2010 | Comments Off
In the CEO’s job, one strike and you’re usually out. The former head of H-P had two. Mark Hurd is fired as Hewlett-Packard CEO as the upshot of a questionable sexual harassment complaint—and Oracle’s Larry Ellison thinks the proper analogy is to Apple’s ouster, in 1985, of its wunderkind co-founder Steve Jobs. At the time, [...]
The Great American Bond Bubble
Posted in Economy and business, Editorials and opinion on August 17, 2010 | Comments Off
If 10-year interest rates, which are now 2.8%, rise to 4% as they did last spring, bondholders will suffer a capital loss more than three times the current yield. Ten years ago we experienced the biggest bubble in U.S. stock market history—the Internet and technology mania that saw high-flying tech stocks selling at an excess [...]
Step 1: Post Elusive Proof. Step 2: Watch Fireworks.
Posted in Mathematics on August 17, 2010 | Comments Off
The potential of Internet-based collaboration was vividly demonstrated this month when complexity theorists used blogs and wikis to pounce on a claimed proof for one of the most profound and difficult problems facing mathematicians and computer scientists. Vinay Deolalikar, a mathematician and electrical engineer at Hewlett-Packard, posted a proposed proof of what is known as [...]
Moose Offer Trail of Clues on Arthritis
Posted in Health on August 17, 2010 | Comments Off
LONG-RUNNING A study that began in 1958 has found poor nutrition as the cause of arthritis. In the 100 years since the first moose swam into Lake Superior and set up shop on an island, they have mostly minded their moosely business, munching balsam fir and trying to evade hungry gray wolves. But now the [...]
Poem of the week
Posted in Poetry on August 17, 2010 | Comments Off
From Longfellow’s translation of the Divine Comedy This time, a poignant excerpt as Dante meets his muse Longfellow’s Victorian version of the great medieval allegory Detail from Dante Illuminating Florence with his Poem, by Domenico di Michelino. “You look like the Wreck of the Hesperus,” my mother used to exclaim irritably, when I came in [...]
‘The War in Afghanistan Reveals Obama’s Impotence’
Posted in Conflicts and wars, Editorials and opinion on August 17, 2010 | Comments Off
Anti-war activists could have a longer wait for the end of the deployment in Afghanistan than expected: The commander of the US troops believes 2011 may be too soon to leave. General David Petraeus was supposed to perform the same magic in Afghanistan as he did in Iraq, and turn the course of the seemingly [...]
Obama muddles his mosque message
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on August 17, 2010 | Comments Off
Last Friday, at the start of Ramadan, President Obama presided over the White House’s annual iftar dinner and made some rather bland remarks about religious freedom. The context, of course, was the controversy over the proposed mosque in Lower Manhattan, which is not, as Obama insisted, about freedom of religion but about religious tolerance. And [...]
Japan as Number Three
Posted in Economy and business, Editorials and opinion on August 16, 2010 | Comments Off
Beijing’s rise, Tokyo’s fall and the wealth of nations. Younger readers may find this hard to believe, but a mere 20 years ago America’s political and academic establishments viewed Japan as the world’s ascendant economic power. “Japan as Number One” was the title of an influential book by Harvard’s Ezra Vogel, and the journalistic fashion [...]
Our ‘Moderate Muslim’ Problem
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on August 16, 2010 | Comments Off
The Ground Zero mosque imam earns wide congratulations while true reformers go ignored. Items of interest in the news media’s coverage of “moderate Muslims”: • The New York Times, Oct. 19, 2001: “Imam Anwar Al-Awlaki, spiritual leader at the Dar al-Hijra mosque in Virginia, one of the nation’s largest. . . . is held up [...]
Waves in the web
Posted in Media on August 16, 2010 | Comments Off
International broadcasters Western state-backed news outfits are struggling to keep their influence in the developing world AS A child growing up in Afghanistan, Saad Mohseni watched his father listening to the BBC World Service and Voice of America: they were almost the only way of obtaining reliable domestic, let alone foreign news. No longer. Last [...]
The End of American Optimism
Posted in Economy and business, Editorials and opinion on August 15, 2010 | Comments Off
Our brief national encounter with optimism is now well and truly over. We have had the greatest fiscal and monetary stimulus in modern times. We have had a whole series of programs to pay people to buy cars, purchase homes, pay off their mortgages, weatherize their homes, and install solar paneling on their roofs. Yet [...]
Uncommon knowledge
Posted in Uncommon knowledge, tagged August 15 2010 on August 15, 2010 | Comments Off
Red = hot Ladies, you can skip this item; it won’t be of much interest to you. Guys, after reading this item, you can’t say this column has never done anything for you! An international team of researchers has determined that red is your new favorite color. In multiple experiments with women around the world, [...]
Rig talk
Posted in The Word, tagged August 15 2010 on August 15, 2010 | Comments Off
What the oil spill did to language As we move on (fingers crossed) into the cleanup-and-restoration stage of the BP oil well disaster, maybe it’s time to cap off a few of the usage debates that bubbled up along with the gusher of crude. I’m not talking about the truly arcane drilling lingo — “junk [...]
Red menace
Posted in Other on August 15, 2010 | Comments Off
How the ‘strange and horrible’ tomato conquered Italy, and America August in New England is the height of tomato season, when fat red beefsteaks, purple and green heirlooms, and tiny, sweet Sungolds beckon at the farmers market. They’re wonderful in crisp salads, as refreshing gazpachos, and all on their own. Perhaps most of all, tomatoes [...]
Power couple
Posted in History on August 15, 2010 | Comments Off
Two presidents, two speeches — and a profound question about the American military that has yet to be answered The two most famous presidential speeches of the last 50 years occurred within three days of each other, yet exist in different spheres of memory. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address flickers in the foggy black and [...]
Ewwwwwwwww!
Posted in Living on August 15, 2010 | Comments Off
The surprising moral force of disgust “Two things fill my mind with ever renewed wonder and awe the more often and deeper I dwell on them,” wrote Immanuel Kant, “the starry skies above me, and the moral law within me.” Where does moral law come from? What lies behind our sense of right and wrong? [...]
Phys Ed: Can Exercise Moderate Anger?
Posted in Health on August 15, 2010 | Comments Off
For years, researchers have known that exercise can affect certain moods. Running, bike riding and other exercise programs have repeatedly been found to combat clinical depression. Similarly, a study from Germany published in April found that light-duty activity like walking or gardening made participants “happy,” in the estimation of the scientists. Even laboratory rats and [...]
The Origins of ‘Relatable’
Posted in On Language, tagged August 15 2010 on August 15, 2010 | Comments Off
Jane E. Wohl writes: “I have noticed among my students a growing use of the word ‘relatable,’ as in ‘I like Sarah Palin. She’s relatable’ (meaning, ‘I can relate to her’). Do you know the origins of this usage? It turns the verb ‘to relate to’ into a very odd adjective.” Applying the word relatable [...]
